Quote Originally Posted by PhoenixPhyre View Post
I do a more limited version of this. The world itself is already created, but there are lots of blank spaces and I'm not averse to retconing things that haven't actually shown up at the table yet. So I listen to my players talk about what they think is going on, or what they discover/create, and then incorporate that into the world. So each group sees the effect of the other groups (I have multiple groups running in the same world). Often old PCs become NPCs along with the organizations they create/change. This has led to completely changed situations-
I've had a lot of success with things like this. I'll plop my players into a half-baked campaign setting, often out of necessity (there's only so much that can be done by one person, even over months/years of writing), and as they come up with things about their character that might reflect on a larger reality of the world, I work it in. As they come up with theories about how such-and-such political dynamic works, or what the major exports of such-and-such duchy HAVE to be given my description of it, I (sometimes) work it in. For example, why was one of my player's character named Zook Boddynock Namfudl, when gnomes in this campaign setting all had Scandinavian-inspired names? Turns out there were two types of gnomes (this is 3.5 D&D so that wasn't standard), and she was just not one of the predominant Old Religion gnomes. That explanation seemed fine to me, especially as Zook was a cleric to a human god, so I ended up working in that there was a major division between the (majority) Old Religion gnomes and the (minority) New Religion (i.e., human gods) gnomes. I hadn't developed gnome culture much before this point, so this player-created sectarian divide was a great way of fleshing out their culture.